- Published on
Since my AuDHD diagnosis, I seem to have been continually discovering new words and labels for things I have experienced all my life.
Before diagnosis, I didn't think I needed more labels. I sometimes hear people say the same thing — that they don't want to be labelled, or that having a label won't change anything.
And perhaps that is the point. The label doesn't change who we are. The experiences were already there.
What a label can change is our understanding of them.
For me, having the right words has been incredibly important. A label gives me something to explore and understand. It helps me recognise patterns and discover that an experience I thought was uniquely mine is shared by other people. Sometimes it has even allowed me to reconsider something I had spent years thinking was a personal failing.
Rather than putting me into boxes, these labels have opened doors.
Every now and then I come across another term and think, Oh! There is actually a reason I do that.
Sometimes it explains something that has frustrated me for years. Sometimes it helps me look differently at something I once considered a failing. And sometimes it explains one of the many contradictions in myself that never made sense before.
The experiences were already there. Having a name for them gave me a pathway to understanding them.
These are some of the labels that have helped me understand how my brain works.
AuDHD
This was probably the most important term of all.
AuDHD isn't currently a formal diagnosis. It is a term commonly used to describe the co-occurrence of autism and ADHD.
I had known I was ADHD for many years, but discovering that I was also autistic — and, more importantly, beginning to understand how the two interact — changed the way I understood myself.
Suddenly, so many of my apparent contradictions made sense.
- Published on
For most of my life, I really thought I understood boundaries.
To me, having good boundaries meant not allowing people to take advantage of my good nature. But I'm beginning to realise that even my understanding of being "helpful" was more complicated than I thought.
Growing up, I had this need to be seen as helpful, and that clearly continued into adulthood.
Being useful - doing things for people, solving problems, stepping in, physically helping, rearranging my life to accommodate someone else's needs - had somehow become tangled up with my sense of self-worth. Being capable and helpful made me feel valuable.
I understood boundaries as something that protected me from people who might take advantage of that willingness to help, but I didn't apply those same boundaries to my family in fact I don’t think I applied them to anyone at all really.
And I certainly didn't think to apply them to myself.
Since my AuDHD diagnosis and, particularly, during this latest period of autistic burnout, I have been thinking and learning a lot about capacity. I'm starting to understand that boundaries and capacity are far more intertwined than I ever realised.
- Published on
I was sitting in a room with a group of women at our local business network when a therapist asked us to think about what a best friend actually does. How they speak to you. How they show up for you. How they treat you when things are hard.
Then she asked us whether we were being that kind of friend to ourselves.
I could only honestly answer: no.
There was something almost desperate in that realisation. Not a gentle nudge of “I should be kinder to myself.” It was a knowing that landed in my body — a recognition that I had to do something about this. That I couldn’t keep going the way I had been.
This was just before my autism diagnosis. I was about to receive the piece of information that would finally make my whole life make sense. But first, I had to reckon with what I’d been doing to myself in the meantime.
- Published on
This week I had a meltdown because of my mother - in front of my mother for the very first time. After a lifetime of holding it together until I was alone, I just couldn’t hold it back. I sobbed and sobbed. I am sixty-something years old. It has taken that long for the mask to slip in front of her. To let her see that I'm not the "confident, in control, reliable and capable person" she has always believed me to be the one she has leaned on for decades. Some masks go very, very deep.
What Autistic Burnout Actually Is
Autistic burnout is not depression. I want to be clear about that, because for decades, that’s what I was told it was. Doctors, well-meaning and wrong, would listen to my description and reach for their prescription pads. But I knew. Even in the 1990s. I had my ADHD diagnosis — but I didn’t yet know I was autistic. What I did know was that the word ‘depressed’ was wrong. I sat in a doctor’s office and said: “I am not depressed. I am burnt out. I cannot do this.” Nobody really understood. The concept of autistic burnout as a specific, neurological experience did not yet exist in clinical awareness.
Autistic burnout is a complete and utter collapse due to overwhelm. It is exhaustion that goes beyond tired — and I know tired. I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I am very familiar with physical exhaustion. But autistic burnout is different. For me it is primarily mental, even as it pulls the body down with it. It is what happens when an autistic brain has been running at full capacity for too long, masking too hard, managing too much, absorbing too much of the world — and finally runs completely out of fuel.
- Published on
Why Neurodivergent Women Wait Decades for Diagnosis
"You're autistic. There's absolutely no doubt."
For one week, I experienced the most profound euphoria I have ever known. I don't have to try anymore. I don't have to fix myself. It's just me. Then came the grief - wave after wave of it. "If only I'd known before."
I had already been diagnosed with ADHD at thirty-one, which had been a relief in itself. But the autism diagnosis thirty years later filled in the missing pieces in a way nothing else ever had. It explained everything. And it raised the question that so many late-diagnosed women ask themselves: why did it take so long?
The answer, I've come to understand, has everything to do with being a woman.
- Published on
I'm in my sixties, and I can hear like a twenty-year-old. My children used to get annoyed because I could hear their whispered conversations from one end of the house to the other. Sounds like a useful thing to have.
BUT
My AuDHD wiring means I can't filter sensory input the way neurotypical brains do. Where others can tune out background noise and focus on a single conversation, my brain pays attention to everything at once - every conversation, every scraping fork, every footstep, every hum of fluorescent lights. All of it. Simultaneously. At full volume.
Restaurant Overwhelm
Imagine that you are sitting in a restaurant trying to have a conversation with someone across the table. A typical brain can focus on that person and let everything else fade into pleasant ambient noise.
My brain doesn't work that way.
- Published on
For most of my early life, I couldn't explain how I knew things. I just knew. And when I tried to explain my knowing to others, I was met with skepticism, dismissal, or worse—the suggestion that something was wrong with me.
I didn't understand that what felt like a liability could actually be an extraordinary gift, and that my neurocomplex mind was wired to access information through channels most people never experience.
It wasn't until my ADHD diagnosis in the early 1990s that I began to have an inkling as to what was actually happening. And even then it took decades to figure it all out. My autism diagnosis in 2025 was the final piece of the puzzle. But understanding my AuDHD is still only part of the story—I also had to recognise the additional neurological differences that came with it: intuition, empathic abilities, altered consciousness states, and more.
I call this combination my "neurocomplex" mind—not just neurodivergent, but a complex layering of AuDHD plus these other abilities that are so often intertwined with it.
- Published on
Every morning I have the same routine - get up at around sunrise, get dressed, take the Hector the Studio Dog for a walk. Then feed him. I'll have my breakfast, which is always the same: a cup of tea, three grapes sliced, one or two of each type of berry that's in season, and four spoons of Greek yogurt. And it will stay the same for years, until I decide to change it. Oh - with the occasional fast morning when I have a cup of green tea instead but that is still built in to my routine. My husband has usually left for work by this time - around 4:30am during harvest.
While I eat breakfast with Hector, I watch a lifestyle or renovation programme on TV. Then I brush my teeth and wash my face. Make the bed. Put on makeup (which I've done since high school). Then I do emails and I clean the kitchen. Sunday is the exception. I have to skip the bed-making because my husband gets up after me and then we head out to breakfast at 6am.
Once I've completed my morning sequence, then it depends on the day. But the order of days has its own pattern too.
- Published on
Why my six page CV feels emotionally hollow
I feel nothing. They're pieces of paper now. I didn't put them up to celebrate myself - I put them up to remind me what I've achieved in life and so that other people could see what I'd done without me having to tell them. Another form of hiding in plain sight.
I've seen others on social media celebrating their wins, their achievements. When I try, it feels performative, presumptuous - like I'm showing off. So I post occasionally, brief and humble: "So proud and grateful to have won this award." And I'll even agree to newspaper articles and interviews. It's a compromise. Public enough to be seen, but modest enough not to trigger the danger signals that have lived in my nervous system for decades.
I used to think this was just me. That I was ungrateful, or broken somehow.
But then I realised - my son does exactly the same thing - so I researched.
- Published on
What is RSD?
RSD isn't something you're born with - it develops over time, particularly in children with ADHD. Here's a statistic that stopped me in my tracks: ADHD/AuDHD children receive an estimated 20,000 more criticisms than neurotypical children by the time they reach high school age.
Twenty. Thousand. More!!